Time-lapse specs for CHDK, which models?

I'm new to the CHDK world and looking to build off some recent work in computer vision. Briefly, i'm a biologist who uses time-lapse cameras to monitor animals feeding on plants. The cameras need to shoot for as many days as possible, preferably 3-5 days, at 1 frame per second. A start delay would be preferable but not required. Image quality is not a priority, so i'm hoping to go get some 40$ old canon powershots from amazon and load of chdk on them. I relatively fast shutter speed would be a priority. Objects will be within 1-2 meters.

Does this sound in the realm of current chdk technology? I'm in the planning stages and just looking for feedback.

I have seem many time-lapse examples, but only for 5-6 hours. Which cheap models would people suggest for maximizing battery life.

I've been using Plotwatcher Pro game cameras (+ 64gb card ~220$) and am ready to hack my own version.

Edit : one frame per second might be a challenge too. And will certainly eat your internal battery in a few short hours. Conventional focus & shoot cycle times for Canon P&S cameras are typically two seconds per frame at best. So you need a special continuous mode script to get around that. If you want that script to also adjust exposure on the fly it gets even harder - this might be the only option rawopts script

In general, it's very hard to give camera recommendations. Most of us only have a few cameras, we can't say how well or poorly CHDK works on the others. Of the cameras I have direct experience with, elph130 and sx160 could potentially meet your criteria. CHDK is reasonably complete on both. There's probably a dozen other cameras that would work equally well, but I have no direct experience with them.

These are cheap cameras, so don't expect amazing image quality.

If you use raw, you will likely have to spend quite a bit of effort on your workflow to get good results.

Setting up a year long timelapse with CHDK will be a fairly technical project and require substantial effort on your part.